7 Dicembre 2025
Flavia Sinisi Garcia
Italy for Rent: How Overtourism and Aesthetic Capitalism are Pushing Away Locals
In June 2025, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s wedding in Venice became a breaking point for Venetians already frustrated by years of overtourism. Activists exhibited banners and threatened blockades, which ultimately forced the billionaire(s) to move the reception away from the historic city centre. But disdain for the celebration and opposition extended beyond physical protest as the Instagram account “No_Space_for_Bezos,” which documented civilian resistance and support to what they viewed as an invasion of their city, quickly attracted over 7,000 followers.
What might have been a glamorous spectacle drawing some of the world’s most notorious A-listers, including Leonardo DiCaprio and the Kardashian clan, turned instead into a symbol of local resistance. For Venetians, this was not just about Bezos, but about a system that increasingly treats their home as a stage set for wealthy outsiders, while locals struggle with rising housing costs, overcrowding, and cultural displacement in a city that is literally sinking. This highlights a broader paradox: Italy and Southern Europe have become both dreamscapes and battlegrounds. Tourism undeniably fuels economies, but it may also erode culture, inflate rents, and force locals out.
Historically, tourism in Europe, and particularly in Italy, has long been associated with aesthetic charm. The “Grand Tour” of the 17th and 18th centuries brought young British aristocrats to Italy to broaden their cultural and intellectual horizons.
By the 1950s and 1960s, Southern Europe saw the rise of affordable package holidays along the Mediterranean coast. Today, however, tourism has morphed into a craving for image and spectacle where destinations are glamorised and consumed through social media. Instead of engaging deeply with history and culture, tourists increasingly flock to Italy in search of the perfect shot: an ice cream posed in front of the Rialto, a clip tossing a coin into the Trevi fountain, or a sunset selfie in Positano, curating images that reduce these experiences to content, enticing prospective visitors to not learn about the history and culture, but to replicate the same snapshots shared by their favourites across Instagram and Tiktok.
This aestheticisation has transformed Italy into a trend, a commodity, and a playground, which in turn has aided in stripping away respect for its heritage. One notorious example occurred in 2023 when locals were outraged at a tourist who carved his and his girlfriend’s initials into the Colosseum, symbolising how cultural treasures are treated as mere props for personal memory-making. The rise of destination weddings underscores this same shift, which reimagines Italy from a place of beauty through culture into a curated backdrop for content consumption. In 2024, over 15,000 foreign couples married in Italy, one third of them American. Palazzos, hills, and lakes that were once sites of learning and cultural exchange are now carefully curated backdrops for Instagram feeds, luxury weddings, and experiential tourism. Much like Made in Italy, the country has become a brand for global consumption, alienating in the process its own locals.
In addition, seventy per cent of international tourists in Italy cluster into just 1% of its territory. This concentration drives staggering inequalities. In Florence, rents rose by 42% between 2016 and 2023 as short-term rentals more than doubled. In Naples, the consequences take the form of one B&B for every three homes in working-class districts, families evicted, and communities hollowed out. Even “authenticity” itself is fabricated. This demonstrates how heritage is not only commodified but sometimes manufactured to feed an insatiable demand for beauty and image while disregarding and disrespecting the culture that created such beauty. This phenomenon, coined as cultural appropriation, is also very common in other global tourist attractions, especially in the Global South, where foreigners consume the culture without respecting it. Meanwhile, the concept of Euro Summer has spread virally on social media. On TikTok, users boast about taking out loans to fund month-long trips, echoing the trend that money is temporary, but the memories of their Euro trip are forever. Tourism, which started as a cultural practice, has become an aspirational aesthetic which often encourages unsustainable behaviours while locals are priced out of their own cities.
Across Southern Europe, grassroots protests are pushing back against these changes. In June 2025, during the Primavera Sound festival, thousands marched in Barcelona, where locals attacked tourists with water guns in an attempt to drive them away and make them feel unwelcome. The city, which welcomes over 20 million visitors annually, faces a tourism density of more than 200,000 people per square kilometre. In Lisbon, protesters carried effigies from churches to hotel construction sites to dramatise the replacement of community life with luxury tourism. In Mallorca, locals blocked double-decker tourist buses and lit flares to stop tourist traffic. And in Venice this past summer, protesters were more direct: “If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay more tax”. These protests are not strictly anti-tourist but rather ‘anti-system’, highlighting governments’ failure to balance economic gain with community survival. This raises the question: if the “Grand Tour” was once the privilege of aristocrats, who enjoys that privilege today? Increasingly, it seems that tourism caters to those who can purchase Italy as an aesthetic experience, rather than those who inhabit it.
At the same time, the pressures of overtourism are colliding with another crisis: climate change. Tourism contributes 8.8% of global emissions, and Southern Europe is on the frontlines, experiencing rising temperatures, prolonged heatwaves, and coastal flooding that threaten both local life and the very destinations tourists come to see.
On the other side of the coin, sustainable tourism activities such as eco-weddings, curated rural retreats, or organic farm stays are accessible mainly to elites. This contributes to the increasing exclusion of ordinary Italians from leisure. In 2024, 31.4% of Italians over 16 could not afford a week-long vacation, compared with an EU average of 27%, meaning that over six million Italian workers missed out on holidays, as most of Italy’s beaches are private, and the cost of an umbrella and two loungers rose from €182 in 2021 to €212 in 2025.
These price points are mostly unattainable to a great number of Italians, which allows wealthy foreigners to benefit from the pleasures of the “Dolce Vita”, while Italians observe from afar.
Although EU research suggests that greater investment in tourism can reduce inequality, create jobs, and revitalise rural regions, when it is managed poorly, tourism extracts more than it contributes. While it may provide employment for some, profits often flow to investors abroad, leaving locals without housing, cultural space, and infrastructure.
Italy’s wealth of UNESCO heritage sites intensifies this paradox, with treasures meant for collective humanity increasingly inaccessible to the people who live alongside them. Without efficient regulation, cities risk losing their local populations, as rising rents and tourist-driven development make it impossible for residents to remain. The “No Space for Bezos” protest captured this dilemma. It was not just about one billionaire’s wedding, but about reclaiming Italy from being rented out piece by piece.
If Europe hopes to preserve its cultural and environmental fabric, tourism must evolve beyond extraction. Platforms like Fairbnb reinvest tourism revenue into local communities. These models show that tourism can serve both visitors and residents, but they remain underused.
Europe now faces a choice: it can pursue short-term profits and become a playground for the wealthy, or build a system where visitors meaningfully support the places they enter. The question is not whether people will come; they always have. It is whether those who live there will still be able to stay.